UNIT V – SOFTWARE PROJECT
MANAGAMENT
Software Project Management Concepts – Process and Project
Metrics – Estimation for Software Projects – Project Scheduling
– Risk Management – Software Configuration Management –
Software Process Improvements (SPI) – The SPI Process –
Capability Machine Model Integration (CMMI) – Other SPI
Frameworks.

Software Project Management
• Software Project Management (SPM) is a proper way of planning and leading software projects. It is a part of
project management in which software projects are planned, implemented, monitored, and controlled.
• Need for Software Project Management: Software is a non-physical product. Software development is a new
stream in business and there is very little experience in building software products. Most of the software
products are made to fit clients’ requirements.
• It is necessary for an organization to deliver quality products, keep the cost within the client’s budget constrain
and deliver the project as per schedule. Hence in order, software project management is necessary to
incorporate user requirements along with budget and time constraints.

• How must people, process, and problem be managed during a software project?
• How can software metrics be used to manage a software project and the software process?
• How does a software team generate reliable estimates of effort, cost, and project duration?
• What techniques can be used to assess the risks that can have an impact on project success?
• How does a software project manager select a set of software engineering work tasks?
• How is a project schedule created?
• Why are maintenance and reengineering so important for both software engineering managers and
practitioners?

SPM concepts and principles
• Effective software project management focuses on the four P’s:
people, product, process, and project.
• People — the most important element of a successful project
• Product — the software to be built
• Process — the set of framework activities and software engineering tasks to
get the job done
• Project — all work required to make the product a reality

Stakeholders
• Senior managers who define the business issues that often have significant influence on the
project.
• Project (technical) managers who must plan, motivate, organize, and control the practitioners
who do software work.
• Practitioners who deliver the technical skills that are necessary to engineer a product or
application.
• Customers who specify the requirements for the software to be engineered and other
stakeholders who have a peripheral interest in the outcome.
• End-users who interact with the software once it is released for production use.

Team Leader: The MOI Model
Motivation. The ability to encourage (by “push or pull”) technical people to
produce to their best ability.
Organization. The ability to mold existing processes (or invent new ones)
that will enable the initial concept to be translated into a final product.
Ideas or innovation. The ability to encourage people to create and feel
creative even when they must work within bounds established for a
particular software product or application.

Software Teams
seven project factors that should be considered when planning the structure of software
engineering teams
• the difficulty of the problem to be solved
• the size of the resultant program(s) in lines of code or function
points
• the time that the team will stay together (team lifetime)
• the degree to which the problem can be modularized
• the required quality and reliability of the system to be built
• the rigidity of the delivery date
• the degree of sociability (communication) required for the project

Organizational Paradigms
• closed paradigm—structures a team along a traditional hierarchy of authority
• random paradigm—structures a team loosely and depends on individual initiative of the
team members
• open paradigm—attempts to structure a team in a manner that achieves some of the
controls associated with the closed paradigm but also much of the innovation that occurs
when using the random paradigm
• synchronous paradigm—relies on the natural compartmentalization of a problem and
organizes team members to work on pieces of the problem with little active
communication among themselves

Avoid Team “Toxicity”
• frenzied work atmosphere in which team members waste energy and lose focus on the objectives
of the work to be performed.
• High frustration caused by personal, business, or technological factors that cause friction among
team members.
• “Fragmented or poorly coordinated procedures” or a poorly defined or improperly chosen process
model that becomes a roadblock to accomplishment.
• Unclear definition of roles resulting in a lack of accountability and resultant finger-pointing.“
• Continuous and repeated exposure to failure” that leads to a loss of confidence and a lowering of
morale.

Agile Teams
• Team members must have trust in one another.
• The distribution of skills must be appropriate to the problem.
• Team is “self-organizing”

Team Coordination & Communication
• To accomplish this, mechanisms for formal and informal communication among
team members and between multiple teams must be established.
• Formal communication is accomplished through “writing, structured meetings,
and other relatively non-interactive and impersonal communication channels”
communication encompasses electronic mail, electronic bulletin boards, and by
extension, video-based conferencing systems. Interpersonal networking includes
informal discussions with team members and those outside the project who may
have experience or insight that can assist team members.

THE PRODUCT
SOFTWARE SCOPE
• Context. How does the software to be built fit into a larger system, product, or
business context and what constraints are imposed as a result of the context?
• Information objectives. What customer-visible data objects are produced as
output from the software? What data objects are required for input?
• Function and performance. What function does the software perform to
transform input data into output? Are any special performance characteristics to
be addressed?

Problem Decomposition
• Sometimes called partitioning or problem elaboration Once scope is
defined
• It is decomposed into user-visible data objects or It is decomposed
into a set of problem classes
• Decomposition process continues until all functions or problem
classes have been defined

The Process
• Once a process framework has been established
• Consider project characteristics
• Determine the degree of rigor required
• Define a task set for each software engineering activity
• Task set =
• Software engineering tasks
• Work products
• Quality assurance points
• Milestones

Melding the Problem and the Process
• Each function to be engineered by your team must pass through the
set of framework activities that have been defined for your software
organization.
• Assume that the organization has adopted the generic framework
activities—
• communication, planning, modeling, construction, and deployment

• The team members who work on a product function will apply each
of the framework activities to it.
• The job of the project manager (and other team members) is to
estimate resource requirements for each matrix cell, start and end
dates for the tasks associated with each cell, and work products to be
produced as a consequence of each task.

Process Decomposition
• Process decomposition commences when the project manager asks, “How
do we accomplish this framework activity?” For example, a small,
relatively simple project might require the following work tasks for the
communication activity:
1. Develop list of clarification issues.
2. Meet with stakeholders to address clarification issues.
3. Jointly develop a statement of scope.
4. Review the statement of scope with all concerned.
5. Modify the statement of scope as required.

THE PROJECT
• In order to manage a successful software project, you have to
understand what can go wrong so that problems can be avoided. In
an excellent paper on software projects,
• John defines 10 signs that indicate that an information systems
project is in jeopardy:

1. Software people don’t understand their customer’s needs.
2. The product scope is poorly defined.
3. Changes are managed poorly.
4. The chosen technology changes.
5. Business needs change [or are ill defined].
6. Deadlines are unrealistic.
7. Users are resistant.
8. Sponsorship is lost [or was never properly obtained].
9. The project team lacks people with appropriate skills.
10. Managers [and practitioners] avoid best practices and lessons
learned.

• John suggests a five-part commonsense approach to software
projects
Start on the right foot.: is accomplished by working hard (very hard) to
understand the problem that is to be solved and then setting realistic
objectives and expectations for everyone who will be involved in the
project

• Maintain momentum: Many projects get off to a good start and then
slowly disintegrate. To maintain momentum, the project manager
must provide incentives
• Track progress. For a software project, progress is tracked as work
products (e.g., models, source code, sets of test cases) are produced
and approved (using technical reviews) as part of a quality assurance
activity

• Make smart decisions. In essence, the decisions of the project
manager and the software team should be to “keep it simple.”
• Conduct a postmortem analysis. Establish a consistent mechanism
for extracting lessons learned for each project. Evaluate the planned
and actual schedules, collect and analyze software project metrics,
get feedback from team members and customers, and record findings
in written form.

THE W5HH PRINCIPLE
A series of questions that lead to a definition of key project
characteristics and the resultant project plan:

• Why is the system being developed? All stakeholders should assess the
validity of business reasons for the software work. Does the business
purpose justify the expenditure of people, time, and money?
• What will be done? The task set required for the project is defined.
• When will it be done? The team establishes a project schedule by
identifying
• when project tasks are to be conducted and when milestones are to be
reached.
• Who is responsible for a function? The role and responsibility of each
member of the software team is defined.
• Where are they located organizationally? Not all roles and responsibilities
reside within software practitioners. The customer, users, and other
stakeholders also have responsibilities.

• How will the job be done technically and managerially? Once product
scope is established, a management and technical strategy for the
project must be defined.
• How much of each resource is needed? The answer to this question is
derived by developing estimates (Chapter 26) based on answers to
earlier questions.